About HackCon

The national Norwegian cyber security conference HackCon was established in 2005 by the network of Norwegian security experts. The goal was to create practical cyber security courses and conference combined with a social meeting place to meet the future challenges within cyber security. The network had good relations with KINS (Information security organization for municipalities) and Honeynor, and together the three groups agreed on arranging HackCon #1 during February 8th and 9th 2006.

Conventions are usually quite expensive, but for HackCon it's important to keep the price down. The reason is that we want the information spread throughout the community, and make it possible for most people to attend. By doing this, the attendees will have the best possible background when meeting future challenges.

Every year, within topics that are highly relevant, around 1200 - 1400 presentations and research are watched to pick the absolutely best speakers for HackCon. From all the presentations/research we go through, about one percent (12 each year) is picked and have the chance to speak at HackCon. In the past, we've had speakers from Norway, Sweden , USA, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, England, Italy, Spain and several other countries.

If you have a relevant presentation, and would like to join the speakers at HackCon, Norway, next time, send us a CFP (Call for paper) before Dec 31st, and we'll include you in our list. Please send it to post [at] hackcon [dot] org.

We choose the best speakers, therefore the speakers at HackCon are very professional and the goal is that all the speakers presents well documented topics, preferably with practical examples and demos. The reason is that we want to give the attendees real examples to bring with them and use when meeting future challenges, as well as the proven fact that demos rocks!

We mean there are three pillars relevant to information security, which are

- Digital elements
- Physical elements
- Psychological elements

At HackCon, we see the necessity of all three pillars together. It doesn't help having firewalls, IDS/IPS and all sorts of technological implementations, if you're missing physical security. And it doesn't help with technical and physical security if your employees are tricked by social engineering.

This is why HackCon focuses on all three pillars to give the attendees knowledge on all the topics and how to deal with them in real life. HackCon also arranges practical and intensive security trainings. By offering different trainings it gives the attendees a complete set of courses to give them the best way to meet challenges. Every attendee received a diploma for every training they complete.

The purpose of HackCon is to give a clear view of what the challenges we see are, so that we can meet them with the best possible knowledge. HackCon is not a "hacker forum", "hacker institution" or a place where people are taught to become "evil" hackers. We don't want to be associated with any of those, since that is the opposite of HackCons objective and integrity.

One of our pillars are also that we will contribute to social development. One of the principles has been that if we can save one child to a better life, we have succeeded and done our civic duty. We will give money to projects aimed at children in developing countries to improve their everyday lives. As HackCon are more like idealistically conference, we support these projects. We know that we alone cannot create a better future for all, but we feel that we have succeeded if we can save a few - we hope that you join us to create a better common future as those least gifted in this world.

The name 'HackCon' has it's origin from the words 'Hack' and 'Con'. 'Hack' is chosen because of the original meaning of the word from the early days, where it usually described a good piece of code or when somebody made something do things it wasn't supposed to do. 'Con' has a dual meaning; both convention and an abbreviation of "Come on nerds" - since 'nerd' was the name many of us were given as we had a genuine interest for science, technology and of course computers and networks. This is also to honor a group of people like Bill Gates, Steven Paul, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Gerald Combs to mention a few, and all the others who made or are making a fantastic job by developing the technological world we're all living in.

HackCon is for the people who are genuinely interested in technology, psychology, IT and security, and who wants to improve their knowledge within these areas.

We want to wish you all welcome to Norway to make HackCon the great yearly experience it is.